Japan Pt. 1

It's crazy that I've been in Japan for almost two weeks now.  Time really does fly by.  So much has happened and I feel like I've been learning non-stop about the culture, language, and myself.  I went to my first big festival a couple nights ago called the Kantou Festival, which was held in Akita City about an hour from my town.  There were thousands of people lining the streets for it and the energy there was incredibly.  There are some pictures from the festival below, though I wish I took more.  I also got a bike and have been exploring the area a bit more with it, finding secluded houses, humongous bugs, and a charm that never existed when I explored by car.  My Japanese is improving a bit and sometimes I'll overhear conversations and hear a few words that I know or be able to make out a sentence which makes me feel super awesome and cool...even though I typically have no idea what the rest of the actual conversation is about.

Oh! And I've been helping one of my future students work on a speech for an upcoming english speech competition.  She's only 14, but is so amazingly smart and adorable.  I.cannot.wait. to have classrooms full of people like her.  I taught her how to do a hand hug today and she taught me how to say hand hug in Japanese.  Pretty fair trade.  My Japanese co-teachers also asked me if I have any nicknames and I told them that some of my friends call me "Mel," but there isn't an "L" in Japanese, so they just call me "Meru,"which makes me smile.

You'll also probably notice, by the pictures below (my first roll of film from Japan!), that I live in the middle of a huge expanse of nature.  It's so amazing and I've never been anywhere more beautiful than here.  There are tons of insects everywhere, but it feels like people in some way respect them as neighbors instead of just shooing them as pests, which I think is really awesome.  I also noticed that nothing is really very random in Japan.  Everything has its own specific place and purpose.  Whether it be the specific duties and hierarchy of office workers or the seemingly odd vending machines lining the edge of the country side, everything has its own way and reason.





I visited a place where you could buy your fortune that was written on a piece of paper.  If you get a bad fortune, you are supposed to tie it to this rope.






The view from my bedroom window.

Kathie-sensei with her students. We could barely walk around without heaps of them running up to her to say hi.

A bee the size of a beetle.













-mg